One of my projects for the summer, other than working on albums with four different musical groups, is reading Infinite Jest. A couple of local friends convinced me to check it out, and we’re all participating, in various degrees of looseness, in the Infinite Summer project. In my case, this means trying to keep up with the reading schedule and not much else, though I plan to go back and read a lot of stuff from the website after I finish. The book is almost 1100 pages, so reading anything else, including websites about the book, is just taking away too much reading time.
I’m somewhat surprised that I’m enjoying this book. It has some of the superficial features that I tend not to like in literary fiction (difficult-to-read sections of dialogue, pages-long passages with no paragraph breaks), but on the whole I’ve found it really enjoyable. It really demands attention, so it’s not easy to read if there is much in the way of distractions around, but David Foster Wallace doesn’t send you running for your dictionary every three words (or even three pages), and you very rarely get the impression that, for as many words as there are, that he’s wasting words. It’s intense, but it feels, on the whole, right.
I hope Infinite Summer sticks around for a while, because the bits that I have checked out (like How To Read Infinite Jest) are helpful, particularly the bit about persevering through the first 200 pages. I didn’t have a lot of trouble with that, because I find DFW did a remarkably good job at hooking me at the beginning, enough that (combined with the book’s vaunted reputation) I was ready to really try to get through it. That said, the first chunk of the book is pretty challenging because there’s so much material to start wrapping your head around. But that said, I also think that the way the new material is unveiled works surprisingly well. There are a lot of narrative threads and characters, but not too many, and he doesn’t go too long before returning to the main ones, so as long as you read consistently, you (or at least I) won’t forget very much.
I’ve managed to get a week or so ahead of schedule, and might even get a little further ahead over the next couple of weeks. We’ll see, but in the meantime, it’s a really big read that I’m enjoying, and will be proud to finish.